Alternate Universe

Summary:
What if things were different? What if Bella and Charlie were the vampires, and the Cullens were just normal, nice-looking humans? Would their love still bud and blossom like a spring flower, or will Bella give into her natural instincts?

Notes:
*pulls out birth certificate* Dang it! It doesn't say Stephenie Meyer, so therefore I do NOT own Twilight or New Moon. I simply add my own touches, this one being a little more prominent to ones I've written in the past. Anyway, enjoy the story!

1. Prologue

It had happened again. Charlie and I had obviously been too conspicuous at hiding our secret. It was almost sad, pathetic even, that our superior intellect could be so easily matched and exceeded by a mere human. But I had to put aside my thoughts of guilt and regret to focus on the task at hand.

We were moving. There was no way around it.

Technically we weren’t moving, as we had already moved and had started unpacking the few belongings we had managed to grab on our escape from Crystal, Maine. Charlie and I had decided we needed to get as far from that town as humanly, well, in-humanly possible while still remaining in the north. So here we were. In Forks, Washington: our new home.

I glanced in the mirror out of boredom, not curiosity. My appearance would always remain the same, no matter what.

My chocolate brown hair slid gracefully to the end of my shoulder bone and was impeccably straight. My golden eyes were now hidden behind a mask of black, specks of topaz peeking out like stars in the night sky, only tinted by my violet eyelids. My skin was pale, paler than in 1887. It was translucent, almost. The reflection wasn’t normal. I wasn’t normal.

I was a vampire, and always would be.

Charlie appeared in my new bedroom holding a box labeled ‘Memories’. I snickered. As if you could call a bunch of scraps of white-laced fabric a memory. All that was in that box were old sets of china and swabs of fabric from the dress my mother had been wearing when she was murdered so many years ago. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my mother, and missed her terribly, but every object sealed in that box held no emotional meaning for me; there were no real traces of her.

Charlie smiled kindly at me, his charcoal eyes lightening slightly at the sight of me unpacking. "Don’t worry, Bells. You’ll like it here! You’ll be able to go outside during the day much more often!" he said, trying to cheer me up.

I nodded absentmindedly, then turned to Charlie. I knew he cared about me and was trying to help, and I was grateful. I just don’t think I could take another four years of high school…

"So," I racked my brain for something to say to knock me out of my boredom. "How old are we?"

Charlie chuckled quietly and sat on my bed-more of a prop than anything else, but a bed nonetheless-and patted the seat next to him, inviting me to join him. I plopped down heavily by his side, causing the bed to shake.

"Bella, you’re 120 years old, and I’m 135, remember?"

I rolled my eyes and sighed unnecessarily, though the corner of my mouth did turn up involuntarily.

"You know what I mean."

"Oh! You mean what ages we’re pretending to be!" He smacked his forehead as he said this, adding to his act. He saw my grimace and immediately stopped kidding around. "Well, I thought you could be seventeen, and I could be thirty-five. May seem a little old, but I don’t know if we’ll be staying here to long."

I smiled glumly. Those were the ages we were when we had our lives so quickly taken from us. "I guess it does make since…wait…" something seemed to click. "Why won’t we be staying here for long?"

Charlie sighed, seeming reluctant to answer for a reason I could not fathom.

"Well, this area is known to be like a pit stop for the travelers, the people of our kind. And our presence here may cause some people to stay longer then they would have had we not been here. We might endanger several people unintentionally."